Servant or Leader?

Bit distracted this morning as I’m leading a bike club ride on Sunday - always slightly nerve-wracking. The responsibility for ensuring that 10 or more (actually perfectly competent) adults have a good ride, enjoy it and arrive home safely weighs on my mind. And it’s completely daft because I know that they’ll all just follow me blindly, won’t take any notice of where they’re going and will definitely have a great time, whatever happens.

Sheep to the Slaughter?
I know this because that’s exactly what I do too when I’m following a cycle leader. I know this because I’ve chatted about this sheep-like behaviour with other club members and found we’re all guilty of the same approach. I know this especially, because last time I led a ride at least two of the riders asked me, as we were returning home in the afternoon, if we’d been to this particular spot (a toll bridge) before on a ride. Which we had. That morning on the way out. They were surprised.

Why do we – club members that is - trust whoever’s leading us so implicitly? It’s definitely not behaviour that we show in other areas of our lives, most of us are much more likely to question what’s going on than not. And we’re an opinionated lot generally. So what’s brought us to this point of ‘follow the leader’?

Servant Leader
It’s all to do with Jim Court. It’s his leadership style that has developed the club into a thriving community of cyclists. And it’s a very modern leadership style. (Jim has probably never thought about having a style – he just gets on with it.) But he does and it’s called servant leadership. Not a great title you might think. The word ‘servant’ sounds old-fashioned and with overtones of servitude. But it’s not that at all.

The core of servant leadership, (the term was coined by Robert Greenleaf in 1977) is the notion that leadership isn’t about directing others, it’s about serving them. And it’s about trust being at the heart of the relationship between the servant leader and his or her followers. Drury in 2004 summed up servant leadership as ‘An understanding and practice of leadership that places the good of those led over the self interest of the leader. (It) promotes the valuing and development of people, the building of community, the practice of authenticity, the providing of leadership for the good of those led, and the sharing of power and status for the common good of each individual, the total organization, and those serve by the organization.’

And that really does describe Jim. Virtually anyone who joins the club comes to us a novice cyclist, and/or unfit, and/or terrified of roads and traffic and/or … well you get the picture. Let’s just say that it’s rare for someone to join us who is a good cyclist already, though it does occasionally happen.

'For the Good of Those Led'
Jim does a number of things for the ‘good of those led’. He chooses routes that build confidence in our ability to handle a bike. He holds fast to our three core tenets that we 1) ride at the pace of the slowest, that we 2)wait at the top of a hill until everyone has climbed it, and that we 3)stop to fix punctures for each other. He chats about cycling too, dropping nuggets of information to demystify some of the more arcane parts of the bike and the cycling world as a whole. And – perhaps the act which most defines him as a servant leader – he has trained some dozen of us up to be ride leaders too.

There’s a great many world leaders who could learn a lot from Jim.